I’ve been blocked on my major literary project in the fantasy genre for over a year now. I did manage to write one piece of short fiction in the Krava’s Legend series, but the second novel hasn’t budged in a long time. Not sure what’s up with that – I have some notion of where the story needs to go – but I’m just not feeling the story the way I did with The Curse of Steel.
Meanwhile, a few days ago I went back and re-read what I had written of my novel Twice-Crowned, which I last worked on in about 2019. It’s about 22,000 words so far, and I find it’s actually pretty good for a rough draft.
Twice-Crowned is a bit of alternate-historical fantasy. It’s set in a world that looks a lot like Classical Greece, but with a few supernatural elements folded in, and a big point-of-divergence that is bending the course of history away from what we’re familiar with.
The notion is that there was a survival of the civilization we call “Minoan,” which got away from the sack of Crete by proto-Greeks and set up an enclave in the west. Where our history put the city-state of Syracuse, this alternate timeline has a city called Danassos. It’s a lot like other Hellenic poleis, with the very prominent exception that women are full citizens, holding property and exercising their own political rights and privileges. In one sense it’s a world-building exercise – how can I come up with a culture that’s plausibly Classical Greek and yet has the very non-Hellenic feature of (relative) gender equality? What consequences would that be likely to have as the history of the period unfolds?
I’ve been moved to spend a few days working on back story and research, with the result that I’ve got a fairly substantial timeline document and the start of some notes on how this imaginary society works. I think by this evening I’m going to package some of that up as a free release for my patrons, just to drum up a little interest in the project. Once that’s done, I need to get back to work on Architect of Worlds over the rest of June.
In the long run, I think Twice-Crowned may become my main literary project for the next few months, taking the place of The Sunlit Lands. Maybe if I can get that novel finished, I can come back to Krava’s Legend with fresh eyes.
Well, May didn’t go quite as planned. I originally planned to write the last open section of Architect of Worlds, but early in the month my muse decided to go and live on Mars instead. I ended up writing about 10000 words describing Mars in the Human Destiny setting, and giving myself a ton of new ideas for the universe and for fiction set therein. So my big project for May turned out to be a new partial interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate instead.
Okay, Mars is (more or less) out of my system now, so it’s back to Architect of Worlds for the month of June. Here’s the formal planning list for this month:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
About the only change from the initial plan for last month is that I’m bumping a new Aminata Ndoye story up in priority a little. My main focus is going to be on Architect this month, but I may spend some time working on a story about Aminata’s first year at the Interstellar Service academy in France. Basically an immediate sequel to “Pilgrimage.”
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to tinker in my extensive spare time with QGIS and the NASA topographical data for Mars. I may work on one or two maps of 23rd century Mars for the Atlas, and if that works out it may yield a couple of free rewards for my patrons. We’ll see how the month goes.
As sometimes happens, my plan for creative work for the current month has taken a big leap out into left field. My original plan for May was to write up the last open section of Architect of Worlds, and release that for my patrons. Instead, I think I’m going to be living on Mars this month.
One of my Human Destiny subprojects is to develop the future history of colonization and terraforming of Mars in that universe. In a sense, Mars is where human beings first figure out how they might fit into the Hegemony’s interstellar society – setting aside the follies of old Earth, disciplining themselves to a centuries-long project in a harsh environment, learning galactic technologies and ways of life. I’ve already written one piece of fiction set on the planet, and Mars is going to be important for the story of my lead character, Aminata Ndoye. Meanwhile, I anticipate dedicating a lengthy section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate just to describe late-23rd-Century Mars.
The spark for getting back to this subproject was the computer game Per Aspera. This is a logistics-engine game, focused on the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Early in May, the developers of Per Aspera released a new DLC which added a bunch of useful features to the game’s model. I sat down to spend a little time experimenting with the new version, thinking I would just spend an evening or two on it . . . but the result was a superb run which gave me all kinds of setting and story ideas. Forget devoting a section of the Atlas to Mars, I suspect I could write a complete tabletop RPG dedicated to this one planet.
Okay, that’s probably an excessive notion. Still, right now I think I could easily write a first draft of that section of the Atlas. I’m also experimenting with the QGIS software package as a tool for making useful maps of Mars. We have a lot of data about the topographical layout of the planet, so producing plausible maps is not going to be a problem.
So that’s the new plan for May: at the very least, produce a new interim partial draft of the Atlas for my patrons and readers. That will be a charged release if there’s at least ten or twelve thousand words of new material. If time permits, maybe knock out one or two maps of terraformed Mars to go with the new text. If I can get Mars out of my system over the new couple of weeks, then I should be able to turn back to that last section of Architect in June.
April came down to the wire, but on the last day of the month I was able to both post a book review and push out the first section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
For the month of May, I think the Top Priority item is going to be Architect of Worlds again. There’s one more section of the book I need to write from scratch, and the “special cases” section needs more love. I suspect between those two items I’ll have plenty of new material, so a combination of them is likely going to be a charged release for the month of May.
The remarkable thing is that if I can hit that mark this month, that will mean that Architect of Worlds will be more or less complete, at least in an initial rough draft. That’s quite a milestone! I think if all goes well, June may see a release of a full rough draft of Architect, all in one document, a true v1.0 for the entire project. That will be a free release for my patrons, since they’ve already seen all the individual pieces.
The book won’t be anywhere close to finished at that point – I anticipate a lot of polishing, production of diagrams and graphics, and layout before I can even consider trying to publish it – but that’s still a big step forward. I begin to think there’s a chance Architect may arrive on virtual store shelves before the end of calendar year 2022.
All that being said, here’s the formal planning list for May:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
I’ve had some ups and downs so far this month, but at about the midpoint I do seem to be on track to reach some good milestones.
I spent the first week or so of April doing an overhaul of parts of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I started out just trying to add an alternative mechanism for producing gas giant planets, but that ended up carrying so many implications that I eventually had to overhaul most of Steps Nine through Eleven. I’m still not happy with the smoothness of the revised text, although the model seems to be working well enough.
Once that was done, I went back to an extended test run for Architect, generating planetary systems for a reasonable cut of the stellar population near Sol. I’m working with the data set associated with the paper The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era – this is probably the best census of the solar neighborhood available at the moment. As of this evening, I’ve gotten about to the five-parsec radius.
I started out systematically generating planetary systems for every star on the list. Mostly this was to verify something I suspected about red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems – that they are very unlikely to generate planets where humans can comfortably settle. So far I think I’ve confirmed that suspicion. I don’t think it’s impossible to find an Earthlike world in a red-dwarf system, but those stars have so many factors stacked against them that such cases are probably quite rare. Scientific and mining outposts, maybe, but not prosperous colonies. So after I generated 19 red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems, I dropped those and concentrated on the brighter stars, spectral type K and up.
I now have 13 planetary systems for those brighter stars, and I’m encouraged to see that Architect is doing a decent job of generating Earthlike worlds (generously defined) for them. If we want air with sufficient free oxygen in it to breathe without too much artificial aid, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Counting Earth, I have six habitable worlds within five parsecs of Sol:
Sol III (Earth)
Alpha Centauri A-III (a super-Earth with a helium-nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere)
61 Cygni B-III (tide-locked)
Epsilon Indi A-II (tide-locked)
Groombridge 1618 III (tide-locked)
70 Ophiuchi A-III (a true Earth-analog, no helium, not tide-locked)
Not bad. Looks like Architect is going to give us a fair number of tide-locked Earthlikes, and the occasional super-Earth with weird but breathable atmosphere. The variety even in this short list is nice to see.
Eventually I plan to work all the way out to the ten-parsec radius, but this will do for now as a stress test for Architect. For the bottom half of April I’m going to switch to writing up some of these worlds and planetary systems, as a first installment in the rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
So for my patrons and readers, here’s the likely release schedule for this month.
I do have a new interim draft (v0.9) of the main section of Architect of Worlds, but I think I’m going to hold off on pushing that out to everyone until I’ve had a chance to go through and polish up the text a bit. I think I also want to get to the long-delayed project of cleaning up all the mathematical formulae so that I’m using more standardized variable names and formats. You may see a v0.9 draft next month sometime.
On the other hand, I’m pretty confident I can have a first interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate ready by the end of April, with at least 10,000 to 12,000 words of material in it. That v0.1 draft will be a charged release for my patrons. I may charge for further additions to that draft, as I have with new sections of Architect or other book-length projects, but only if and when there’s enough genuinely new material to justify it.
Protoplanetary disk of the young star AB Aurigae. Notice the distinctive spiral-arm-like structures. One of these appears to be associated with the formation of a massive gas giant planet, at an unusually large distance from the protostar.
I’ve spent the first few days of April working with thecurrent version of Architect of Worlds, building planetary systems for nearby stars. Almost immediately, I’ve run into an issue which may be connected to recent scientific results.
It’s ironic that the process of writing Architect has been a little like doing original scientific research. The book’s main design sequence, when you get right down to it, is a big elaborate model that I hope will have predictive value, in that it will generate planetary systems that resemble what we’re seeing in the real universe. The goal is fictional plausibility, not true explanatory power, but the process of development is often the same. If I start comparing the model to the real universe (that is, to known exoplanetary systems) and the model seems unable to mimic the visible results, then there’s a problem and I need to adjust the model.
The immediate issue is that the current (v0.8) draft of the Architect design sequence assumes the core accretion model for planetary formation. That is to say, we assume that planets form in certain regions of the protoplanetary disk, when solid particles clump together and form protoplanets massive enough to start quickly accreting more material. We expect smaller rocky planets to form inside the “snow line,” in a region where water ice isn’t available. We expect gas giant planets to form outside, with the largest gas giant preferentially forming close to the line. We also play with planetary migration and the so-called “Grand Tack” model, so that the largest gas giant may move inward or outward from that initial position, but only within reasonable limits.
Our own planetary system seems to fit that model reasonably well, as do many of the other exoplanetary systems we’re aware of. There’s a catch, though. In some cases, we find what appears to be the largest gas giant forming far outside the snow line. Much further than the core-accretion model can account for, even with a generous “Grand Tack” hypothesis thrown in. Here are some examples I’ve pulled together over the past few days:
Star
Predicted Snow Line
Innermost Gas Giant
Ratio
Wolf 359
0.15 AU
1.85 AU
12.3
Proxima Centauri
0.17 AU
1.49 AU
8.8
Lalande 21185
0.56 AU
2.85 AU
5.1
Groombridge 34
0.59 AU
5.40 AU
9.2
Gliese 832
0.75 AU
3.46 AU
4.6
Epsilon Indi
1.75 AU
11.55 AU
6.6
HR 8799
8.10 AU
16.25 AU
2.0
AB Aurigae
23.30 AU
93.00 AU
4.0
Of all these cases, only HR 8799 is one that the current version of Architect could easily handle, and even that planetary system is problematic – because we know of four exoplanets there, and the one on this table is only the innermost of the four. Most of these gas giants are much further out than my current “Grand Tack” procedures could possibly account for.
Meanwhile, the masses of most of these exoplanets are a lot higher than we would normally expect for their primary stars. For example, several of these stars are low-mass red dwarfs – we wouldn’t normally expect them to generate gas giant planets at all. Some of the others have planets several times as massive as Jupiter, approaching masses more typical of brown dwarfs.
Notice the first few rows on this table are several of the stars closest to Sol. If I’m running into difficulty this quickly, that means I’m not seeing rare special cases here. There’s some way in which planetary formation just isn’t (always) working as I expect. Not the first time this has happened during the development of Architect of Worlds, and it won’t be the last.
Fortunately, there’s a new model that seems to help. That’s the so-called disk instability model for the formation of gas giant planets. Apparently, at least in some cases, gas giants don’t form close to the snow line via a well-behaved process of core accretion. Instead, especially if the protoplanetary disk is unusually dense, or if gravitational interaction from nearby stars stirs things up, the disk becomes unstable. Simulations of the process show that much of the disk can form “spiral arms” rather like those of a galaxy . . . and the result can be the rapid formation of unusually massive planets much further out from the protostar than expected.
We’ve actually imaged an example of this happening, as some very recent results show. The very young star AB Aurigae appears to be in the process of forming a massive gas giant, over 90 AU out from the protostar (the last line of the table above covers this case). This, along with some other observations, seems to lend some credence to the disk instability model for at least some planetary formation.
What this means for Architect of Worlds is that I’m probably going to need to add some material to the current Steps Nine and Ten, in which the structure of the protoplanetary disk and the arrangement of the outer planetary system are determined. I think I’ve already worked out some of the details, so I may be able to make the necessary revisions to my working (v0.9) draft within another day or two. Then I should be able to get back to the test run on which I had planned to spend the month of April.
All of which means that my patrons and other readers can reasonably expect a free v0.9 update to the main Architect document this month, along with anything else I produce.
For a while, I was afraid that March would be yet another month without any big block of new material to share, but then I had a remarkably productive week and was able to produce a first interim draft for the “special cases” section of Architect of Worlds. So March ended on a good note, and now I need to think about April.
I think I’m going to restructure my priority list, starting this month. Instead of listing several projects as all being “Top Priority,” I’m going to restrict myself to one project that’s going to get the lion’s share of my time in the coming month. That’s the project that seems to me most likely to produce a block of new material suitable for sharing with patrons and other readers. Everything else is going to get pushed down to “Second Priority” (projects that may get some time, but probably won’t lead to a big block of new material) or “Back Burner” (projects that I’m keeping on the docket but don’t expect to work on at all during the coming month).
For the month of April, I think the Top Priority item is going to be to work on a rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate, a new tabletop-oriented book that describes the late-23rd-Century universe of the Human Destiny setting. Working on that project for the first time is also going to help me make progress on several items on this month’s Second Priority list:
Give the current (v0.8) draft of the Architect of Worlds design sequence a thorough workout, looking for possible ambiguities and bugs to be corrected, possibly leading to a v0.9 release.
Similarly, test and improve on the “working with astronomical data” (v0.1) and “special cases in worldbuilding” (v0.1) sections of Architect, possibly leading to v0.2 releases for those.
Also, work out how my particular take on the Cepheus Engine system is going to represent this kind of setting, which is kind of different from the usual representation (3D space, more detailed world writeups, and so on). If I come up with some results here, those may go into the interim draft of the Player’s Guide, leading toward a v0.5 release for that.
So, without further ado, here’s the formal planning list for April:
Top Priority:
Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout. Produce a v0.1 interim draft (at least 10,000 words) by the end of the month as a charged release.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section, possibly leading to a free v0.2 update.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
Well, I was beginning to think March would be another month of not reaching my main goals, but the last few days have been more productive than I might have expected.
My primary project this month was to produce the initial partial draft of the “special and unusual cases” section for Architect of Worlds. At the moment, that section isn’t complete, and it probably won’t be complete before the end of the month. On the other hand, I expect it will have about 8000-9000 words of new material, which is right on the threshold of what I would consider worth sending to my patrons as a charged release.
I’m therefore about 90% certain that there will be a charged release for this month, probably appearing on 31 March, consisting of the first interim partial draft of this section of Architect. As with the other sections that I’ve been working on, especially the main design sequence, this is the only draft for which my patrons will be charged. Later additions and updates to that section will be free releases.
I should point out that this is very nearly the last section that needs to be written for Architect of Worlds. There’s still one section outstanding – the one describing how to design maps of interstellar space for a science-fiction setting – but I’m anticipating that section may be fairly short on word count. I may take a crack at that section next month . . . depending, of course, on what else might present itself as ready to spring from my brow, fully armed and with a mighty shout.
What’s really encouraging is that if that last section does get down on paper, virtually speaking, it means the book will actually be finished, at least in a rough draft. The very next step I would take at that point is to integrate all of the sections into a single coherent draft, after which my patrons and readers would be getting updates to the whole book at once. I anticipate a few months of further editing and polishing before the text gets finalized, and I move to actual layout and production.
There seems to be a reasonable chance that Architect of Worlds will actually be published before the end of calendar year 2022. After which I suspect I will be heaving an enormous sigh of relief.
A quick taste for what I’ll be working on this month. This is a section of the eventual book that will cover “special cases” in the design process, things that stand as exceptions or as extra details outside the main body of the world design sequence.
Hopefully this will end up being enough material (10-15 thousand words or more) to justify a new release for my patrons this month. Actually, now would also be a good time for any of my readers to suggest anything else that might fit into this section. Drop me a line if there’s some special topic that you want to see addressed that isn’t in this sketch outline.
Well, February was at least somewhat successful – I managed a major rewrite of sections of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, and released a new interim draft of that for a wide audience. I think in March I’m going to try to keep up my momentum there, and work on some new sections of the book. It would be nice if I could have the whole rough draft finished before summer, so I could work on final polish and layout and actually get the book out at last.
There’s one new development in how I’m planning to structure these projects. I’m going to break the Human Destiny setting bible into two distinct books for eventual publication under the Cepheus Engine game rules. The core setting bible itself will get the working title of the Human Destiny Player’s Guide, and then there’s going to be a separate Atlas of the Human Protectorate that provides location data and adventure seeds. My patrons will get free updates to the Player’s Guide, since I’ve already charged them for that once, but the Atlas will likely be a charged release once there’s enough material there to justify one.
Meanwhile, I really need to get unblocked on Krava’s Legend again if I can. it’s been well over a year since The Curse of Steel was published, and it needs to start getting sequels if the series is ever going to attract an audience.
Here’s the list for March:
Top Priority (“this is how I’ll judge whether the month has been successful”)
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings.
Architect of Worlds: Start work on a section of special cases and additional worldbuilding material that doesn’t fit into the design sequence.
Human Destiny: Start compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate, meanwhile giving the Architect of Worlds material a good workout.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Second Priority (“work on this as time permits”):
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Back Burner (“work on this only if everything else gets blocked”):
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine)
I think the top priority for a charged release will be to get the initial draft of the “special cases and additional worldbuilding topics” material finished. The other items are more likely to give rise to free updates for my patrons.
